Michael Rubenfeld

WRITER

The Woods is a new play in development that I began developing as part of the Factory Theatre's Natural Resource Unit, and then later with Soulpepper Theatre Company. It is now being support by Necessary Angel Theatre Company, with Alan Dilworth.

Story:

To survive the war, Szymon and Chawa escaped to the forest where they have lived ever since, raising a family and living in relative safety.  40 years later, their children, now fully grown,  have begun secretly traveling beyond the woods and into the bordering towns.  Having had a taste of greener pastures, Szymon and Chawa are forced to deal with their children's needs, while simultaneously re-examining their own. Is it better for them to remain put, or to try and re-integrate into the land that was responsible for their oppression? The Woods is a contemporary work investigating the possibility reconciliation, and the consequences/manifestations resulting from genocide.

Created by Paul Bargetto and Michael Rubenfeld
Text by Piotr Armianovski with Bargetto and Rubenfeld
Video by Piot Armianovski
Sound by Natan Kryszk

If I Had a Gun, I’d Take Them All Down is an intensely personal and politically charged solo performance that unfolds as a real-time walk across the city of Kyiv. The piece is built from documentary material gathered by Ukrainian writer and displaced activist Piotr Armianovski, whose lived experiences of war, protest, and exile shape the emotional landscape of the work.

Canadian-Jewish performer Michael Rubenfeld does not attempt to portray Armianovski. Instead, he embodies the writer’s walk, moving physically across the stage as the projected streets of Kyiv flow behind him. Through this fusion of live performance and documentary video, the piece creates an uncanny simultaneity: the performer is both here and there, both in Warsaw and in Kyiv, both safe and in danger.

The work is rooted in questions of displacement, belonging, responsibility, and the pursuit of dreams under extreme conditions. At the center is Armianovski’s own question:

What price are you willing to pay for your dream?

The performance is a meditation on that cost.

The performance is structured around a single continuous walk.

Onstage, Rubenfeld walks, stops, reacts, and engages with the projected city as if physically present inside it. This creates an embodied documentary form in which:

● the stage becomes Kyiv;

● the performer’s breath and fatigue merge with the real journey;

● the personal merges with the political.

The visual world is created through large-scale video projection, filmed by Armianovski

in Kyiv. The performer is always in dialogue with the projected image — sometimes following its rhythm, sometimes resisting it, sometimes overwhelmed by it.

Created by Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowski
Directed by Marcin Wierzchowski
Adapted and Written by: Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowsk

FORD is a gripping, multi-layered theatrical investigation into the life, myth, and afterlife of legendary Polish-Jewish filmmaker Aleksander Ford.

The performance begins on a contemporary film set, where an American director arrives in Poland to make a film about Ford. As the production unfolds, tensions emerge—between ambition and intimacy, authorship and control, past and present. What begins as a film about Ford quickly starts to mirror his life, as relationships fracture and the process itself becomes unstable. 

From this point, the performance fractures open. Scenes from Ford’s life—wartime survival, artistic ascent, political entanglement, exile, and personal collapse—interweave with the present-day narrative. The boundaries between biography and projection dissolve. Ford is no longer a fixed subject, but a contested figure, constantly rewritten by those around him.

At the center of this unraveling are the women in Ford’s life—wives, collaborators, witnesses—who challenge the mythology of the “great director.” Through their voices, a different portrait emerges: a man shaped by trauma and reinvention, driven by ambition, and often destructive in his relationships. 

As the performance accelerates, Ford is put on trial—by history, by politics, by memory, and by those he left behind. Accusations, contradictions, and identities collide, exposing the instability of truth itself. 

At the same time, the contemporary film project begins to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, revealing that the attempt to tell Ford’s story inevitably reproduces his patterns of control, obsession, and self-invention.

Blending cinematic language, fragmented narrative, and shifting perspectives, FORD actively confronts the audience with urgent questions: Who has the right to tell a life? What does it mean to construct identity through art? And what is the cost—personal and historical—of survival, reinvention, and ambition?

Rather than resolving these tensions, FORD exposes them—transforming biography into a live, unstable process of confrontation between past and present, truth and narrative, memory and erasure.

Created by Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowski
Directed by Marcin Wierzchowski
Adapted and Written by: Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowski

We call “Time Shelter” a work inspired by Gospodinov’s novel, because that is exactly what it is. It is a new work that borrows the essential context and themes of Gospodinov’s novel, however in an entirely new story with a reality based in Poland.

At its core, like all of Wierzchowski and Rubenfeld’s work together, Time Shelter is about the trickster that is memory. How does memory operate as a constructor and constructor of reality, and what are the tools it uses in which to do so?

At the centre of Time Shelter, like in the novel, is Gaustine’s clinic for the past. It is a home for Alzheimer’s patients, situating their realities in a chosen period of history. The theory is that this will offer a more comfortable life that implements long-term memories rather than the unreliable short-term memory of dementia patients.

This Time Shelter is about two families dealing with their new old worlds while also trying to make sense of their present realities. For the Baliński family, they must negotiate their mother, Janina’s return to the Solidarity period; a time when their father, a Solidarity hero, was still alive. For the Serafin family, it is the patriarch, Wiesław, who has returned to 1968 Poland for the first time since being forced to leave his beloved Poland in 1968 because of his family’s Jewishness.

Sights, sounds and smells incite returns to these periods of past longings. And yet despite its seductions, the past is never as simple as our nostalgic yearnings may have us believe.

Time Shelter invites audiences into its worlds of nostalgia, investigating the ways we use the shelter of time as a way to deal with our lives in the present.

CAST

Bolesław Brzozowski
Bogdan Brzyski
Szymon Czacki
Anna Dymna
Małgorzata Gałkowska
Zbigniew W. Kaleta
Anna Paruszyńska - Czacka
Błażej Peszek
Paulina Puślednik
Jacek Romanowski
Michael Rubenfeld

CREATORS

Joanna Załęska - Scenography
Paula Grocholska - Costumes
Aneta Jankowska - Choreography
Marta Zalewska - Music
Szymon Kluz - Lighting Design
Borys Dubiański - Video
Jan Władysław Łuć - Acting installations, research, transcriptions
Julia Lange, Jakub Drewnicki - Director’s Assistants
Krzysztof Sokołowski - Stage manager/Prompter

'Submergence' by Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowski, directed by Marcin Wierzchowski at the S. Wyspianski Silesian Theater in Katowice.

Photos: Przemyslaw Jendroska

Although on the surface it seems soap opera-like, this performance is an almost painful, strikingly authentic vivisection of the lives of two families brought together by friendship and a dramatic accident. When an unexpected visitor shows up at the home of the Kamocki family living in Katowice, old secrets begin to surface. How much does this man know about an event from years ago that everyone would rather forget? And is he really who he claims to be? How is the past trauma reflected in today's life? Sometimes to find out the truth you have to go much deeper than you might have thought.

Co-created and written by: Michael Rubenfeld, Marcin Wierzchowski
Directed by: Marcin Wierzchowski
Assistant Direction: Stanisław Chludziński
Scenography, Costumes: Magda Mucha
Movement and Character Work: Aneta Jankowska
Music: Marta Zalewska
Lighting: Szymon Kluz
Stage Manager: Barbara Dudek
Sound Design: Miroslaw Witek
Light and Video Operators: Tomasz Wustrau, Waldemar Janiszek
Camera operator: Bartłomiej Sowa
Production Manager, Technical Manage: Maciej Rokita
Assistant Production Manager:Dorota Damec

Cast:

Łucja Kamocka: Violetta Smolińska
Władysław Kamocki: Grzegorz Przybył
Olga Kamocka: Agnnieszka Radzikowska
Mikołaj Kamocki: Dawid Kobiela
Teresa Mazurek: Karina Grabowska
Stranger: Michael Rubenfeld
Irina Koroblyova: Kateryna Vasiukova
Rita Litvinova: Nina Zakharova
Daniel Mazurek: Maksimilian Riedel

"Poland is not yet lost!" is a satirical, futuristic vision of Polish reality, in which Jews have taken over, changing the structure of the state and the existing social order.

Israel, after losing American support, found itself in a weakened state that allowed Iran and Saudi Arabia to claim the country for itself, forcing the Jews out. While many went to America, Canada, Australia, etc – Poland, with the support of the former movie star and now president, Maciej Stuhr, welcomed 3 million Jewish refugees back to Poland. This Jewish influence inspired many to choose to convert themselves to Judaism, including the president himself. Now, Poland, a country of over 6 million Jews, is on the brink of becoming the new Jewish state. The performance takes place on the evening of the final referendum in which the audience must vote as to whether they accept or reject this radical transformation.

The show's hosts - Dorota Abbe, a Polish Jew living in Poland, and Michael Rubenfeld, a Polish Jew born in Canada now living in Poland - take the audience through an event designed to encourage a vote for “yes”. They paint a picture of a beautifully, inclusive world where gay marriage, gender equality, pro-choice and progressive politics is the reward for accepting Poland as the new Zion. The audience is taught Yiddish songs, introduced to a priest and nun who converted to Judaism as well as a queer couple who could finally be married after their conversions.

Underneath this cheerful facade, however, lies a bitter truth: it is the non-Jews who are to become second-class citizens in Poland - the privileged ones being citizens of Jewish origin. or those who choose to convert. Those who wish to remain non-Jewish, however, will become a minority within the structures of a homogeneous Jewish society. They will lose many of their rights, however will be given the opportunity to leave the Polish Jewish Republic voluntarily.

The play is a provocation that encourages a deeper reflection on the consequences of systemic nationalistic violence.

It includes the anti-Semitic rhetoric that unfortunately still lingers in Polish society, and ultimately embodies the greatest nightmare of supposed True Poles: That the Jews will return to take everything from them.

It is written and directed by Michael Rubenfeld and Dorota Abbe. It can be performed in both Polish and English.

ALTE HAJM / OLD HOME
אַלטע היים / סטאַרי דאָם

Written by Michael Rubenfeld and Marcin Wierzchowski
Directed by Marcin Wierzchowski

Premiere: February 18, 2022, Main Stage
Nowy Theatre in Poznań, Poland

ALTE HAJM / OLD HOME is a transgenerational comedy-drama directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, well-known to Polish audiences from the first non-fiction theatre series in Poland – THE STORY OF JEŻYCE. LISTEN TO THE CITY!, a series that tells the story of Poznan’s Jeżyce district using real stories from local residents. Marcin is a laureate of many theatrical awards and distinctions for exceptional original performances and artistic projects (one of his most famous performances “The Secret Life of The Friedmanns” at the Ludowy Theatre in Kraków won the 10th edition of The Divine Comedy Festival in Kraków).

Alte Hajm / Old Home invites audiences into a world inhabited by the living and ghosts of the dead. It is teeming with tales of desire and loss, full of multi-layered family stories – the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones we do not always have the courage to bring to light ...

The starting point is familiar: the Kusz family reunite in their the generations-old family home to celebrate the 45th birthday of the oldest of three siblings. And soon, like in many such family tales, strong emotions, old wounds, regrets and resentment begin to rise to surface from their years of repression. Family photos, birthday cake and jokes around the table make way for the ghosts of history. Will their voices be heard, or will the noise continue to keep them hidden in their oblivion? When an expected Jewish guest arrives from America, the voices of history become too loud to ignore – and the souvenirs from the attic begin to reveal what’s been hidden under the floor for over 75 years.

Direction: Marcin Wierzchowski
Script: Michael Rubenfeld, Marcin Wierzchowski
Scenography and costumes: Magdalena Mucha
Music: Marta Zalewska
Stage movement: Aneta Jankowska
Video: Mateusz Czuchnowski
Light Designer: Szymon Kluz
Director’s Assistant: Jan Łuć
Stage Manager: Józef Piechowiak

Cast:

Dorota Abbe
Weronika Asińska
Aneta Jankowska (guest performance)
Maria Rybarczyk
Małgorzata Walenda
Martyna Zaremba-Maćkowska
Sebastian Grek
Paweł Hadyński
Andrzej Niemyt
Dariusz Pieróg
Dawid Ptak
Jan Romanowski
Michael Rubenfeld (guest performance)

Ways of Being

An interactive performance for two different groups of audience, in two different cities, simultaneously.

Clayton is in Kingston and Michael is in Krakow, Poland. This show uses the Internet and theatrical magic to create a shared space where the two artists can perform together. Canadian and Polish audience members are invited to engage with the artists, and each other in an attempt to imagine and re-reimagine their relationships to the city, to the productive possibilities of the Internet, and to time itself.

Ways of Being is a love letter to the act of gathering and the experiences that can emerge within.

Commissioned by the Kick and Push Festival and FOLDA
Workshopped as part of the 2021 Kick and Push Festival
Performed as part of FOLDA / Festival of Live Digital Art / www.folda.ca

Created and performed by: Clayton Lee and Michael Rubenfeld
Video and Lighting Designer: Frank Donato
Associate Video and Sound Design: Erwin Jeneralczyk
Filip Czaja: Sound Designer
Tom Luguisto: Sound Engineer

Produced by Selfconscious Productions
Krakow Producer: Daniel Arbaczewski

Co-Founder / Co-Director
(2017 - Present)

Festivalt is a program of performance and visual art that celebrates and investigates the complexities of the contemporary Jewish Polish landscape. The programme offers 7 days of programming that directly addresses questions of identity, memory, and place in Krakow, Poland. Using Poland as a cultural case study of both wealth and lack in a Jewish context, we will re-activate Jewish spaces with learning, site-specific interventions, theatre, performance art, discussions, photography, and music.

FestivALT schedules its program of events to complement the celebrated Jewish Culture Festival, which draws an international audience. We’ve invited dynamic artists and scholars from Poland and around the world to show new work that captures their unique experiences of Jewishness: old world, new world, backward-looking, forward-looking, centered on objects, sites, relationships, texts, inheritances, the body.

festivalt.com

2017 FestivALT - June 25 - July 1 (guide)
2018 FestivALT - June 23 - June 31

The inaugural FestivALT was covered in the Jewish Telegraph Association (JTA), The Time of Israel and Virtual Sztetl.

Lucky Jew is a performance work conceived by Michael Rubenfeld and co-created by Jason Francisco and with Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska. Additional input by Maia Ipp.

The performance is a response to the common practice in Poland of selling images of Jews with coins. The images are bought and put on walls as the folklore is that they will bring economic luck. The images, while inherently anti-semitic, have been given a filo-semitic endowment.

For the performance, I dress to look similar to one of the images, and sell images of myself counting my own money to people on the streets claiming that these images of a real Jew will give “actual” luck, whereas the other images are fake and thus not as lucky. I sit behind a large frame and on the table I also have the same props used in the images: a feather pen, and ink blot, a book, a sack of money and coins on the table.

Co-Created by Michael Rubenfeld and Sarah Garton Stanley with Mary Berchard and Katka Reszke

We Keep Coming Back tells the mostly true story of a trip to Poland that Michael Rubenfeld took along with his mother Mary Berchard and film-maker/author Katka Reszke. It is a story that he set in motion and one that now involves a core co-creative team. It was a trip of return to the country of Michael and his mother’s cultural origin. While elemental in its urge to reunite mother and son, the work is also steeped with a contemporary politic. While seeking to understand Poland’s complicated history, the narrative takes an unexpected turn in discovering a vibrant contemporary world of Jewish life in Poland.

In her book Return of the Jew, Katka refers to this narrative as the ‘Generation Unexpected’ – this is a new generation of young Polish Jews who are mostly descendants of Jewish families who had hid their roots to survive both the pogroms and later, the Shoah. It was only after the fall of Communism in 1990, that it became safe to once again practice as a Jew in Poland. Subsequently, thousands of discoveries of unexpected Jewish histories have been made – and these stories are growing every day.

In our performance, the concept of ‘generation unexpected’ is realized both in the retelling of Katka’s own story of personal Jewish discovery, and by dissecting Poland’s confrontation with the energy of a revitalized Jewish narrative in Poland, and the deep roots of a North American antipathy towards Poland. To borrow from and broaden Katka’s term, ‘generation unexpected’ characterizes the surprising positions each of the four characters in We Keep Coming Back are revealed to hold. It also elementally sits at the nexus of unexpected results forever revealing themselves in the other generation.

We Keep Coming Back is presented in a visually and audio rich environment, incorporating video footage from the team’s research trips, archival material (photographs, maps), and recorded music. The creators play themselves.

It was developed in Toronto and Poland.

Production History:

September - 2015 - Residency at Kana Theatre, Szczecin, Poland (showing)
May - 2016 - Workshop at Theatre Centre, Toronto (showing)
June - 2016 - Preview performance at Kana Theatre (Spoiwa Festival)
June/July 2016 - World Premiere in Krakow as part of the Jewish Culture Festival
September, 2016 - Canadian Premiere at the Ashkenaz Festival
June/July, 2017 - 5 city Polish tour (Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, Wroclaw and Bialystock)
March 7 - 11 2018 - Winnipeg, Manitoba (Winnipeg Jewish Theatre)
March 13-14 , 2018 - Vancouver, BC (Chutzpah Festival)

Upcoming:

November 1, 3 + 4 2018 - Arts Depot, London, UK
November 7-10 - English Theatre Berlin
November 14-25 - Factory Theatre, Toronto

ARTISTIC PRODUCER

SummerWorks exists to provide space for dedicated, professional artists to take artistic risks and venture into new territory, while throwing the doors open to artistic experiences and opportunities for both emerging and established artists, arts workers, and audiences.

Founded in 1991 as a response to an identified need to serve a growing, under-represented theatre community, SummerWorks has grown from a Fringe-style theatre festival into Canada’s largest juried multidisciplinary performance festival. Significant changes over the course of SummerWorks’ history include the transition from a lottery system to a fully juried festival, the creation of the Canadian Pavilion (later the National Series) showcasing the work of artists from across Canada, the introduction of the Music Series, the Live Art Series, Musical Works in Concert and, in 2013, the inaugural International Series. Another development has been an increased commitment to engagement and learning opportunities for audiences and emerging artists, resulting in the development of the Performance Bar, Shop Talks, youth programming and the SummerWorks Leadership Intensive Program.

Currently, SummerWorks is widely considered one of the most important agencies for new work in the country. Our juried and curated process and dedication to innovation, originality and meaningful engagement means the incredible amount of high-quality art developing at SummerWorks is unparalleled in Canada. This is affirmed by the high percentage of work that receives additional presentation beyond the festival, as well as multiple Dora Mavor Moore nominations and awards and two Governor General’s Awards in the past five years. 

FESTIVAL DIRECTOR
(From 2015 to 2016)

In 2015, Michael inaugurated Progress, an International Festival of Performance and Ideas. The Festival was a response to my desire to create a new international festival stage in Toronto that was accessible and collaborative. In collaboration with The Theatre Centre, I approached multiple local performance companies, inviting them to be a part of curating the festival. The inaugural Festival was curated by SummerWorks, Why Not Theatre, Volcano Theatre, FADO Performance Art Centre, Dancemakers, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and The National Arts Centre.

I personally curated and produced (with Sue Balint) three projects for the festival: Marathon, by Aharona Israel (Mainstage), Magarate, by Janek Turkowski (Incubator) and a residency and workshop reading of Novorossiya: No One's Land, a documentary play by Pavel Yurov and Anastasiya Kasilova from Ukraine.

The Festival was for two weeks from February 4-15th
The 2016 Festival run January 14 - February 7th

http://www.thisisprogress.ca

CO-CREATOR, PRODUCER

Performed in Toronto, St. Catherines, Aurora, Kingston, Peterbrough and Whitby (all Ontario)

The Book of Judith, created by Michael Rubenfeld and Sarah Garton Stanley, in consultation with Judith Snow, is a musical play about a man driven to change the lives of others without first changing his own.

After an arranged meeting with Judith Snow, an artist and former advocate with quadriplegia, a young theatre maker named Michael Rubenfeld, believes he has seen the light. His rapture convinces this now self-anointed preacher man to share the glory of his transformation with all. In an unrelenting crusade to share this inspirational story, he decides to put on a public performance, sharing his story of meeting and coming to know Judith Snow. He desires only to show others the light as it was shown to him. Or at least this is what he fervently believes. With the assistance of an integrated choir comprised of singers with and without disabilities, Michael attempts to convert everyone with his message of hope, love and freedom. He believes he is speaking the wisdom of Judith Snow.

The show stars Michael Rubenfeld as the impassioned Matthew Goldberg, is directed by Sarah Garton Stanley, and features Judith Snow as herself. The music is composed by Andrew Penner of the well-known Toronto band, Sunparlour Players. The choir – who play a big role in the unraveling of this story – is comprised of members of our host communities.

The Book of Judith creates an opportunity for dialogue about inclusion, accessibility, agency, definition and the pervasiveness of ignorance. By questioning commonly held ideas about disability, The Book of Judith travels from innocence to ignorance and aims for the other side – a truer place of transformation.